New Pluto Pictures Reveal Snakeskin Terrain, Glacial Lakes

Now that the initial New Horizons photos showed us a world unlike any we've ever seen, the latest batch simply deepen the mystery. NASA called them "dazzling and mystifying," some of the first full color shots of the world reconstructed from spectroscopy data.

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The Snakeskin

NASA / JHU

Perhaps the most vivid of the new images is this image of the "snakeskin," which mission geologist Bill McKinnon says looks more like "tree bark or dragon scales than geology." The ridges are mountains, but unlike any we've ever seen.

Sputnik Planum

NASA / JHU

The eastern hemisphere of Tombaugh Regio, Pluto's heart-shaped region, has until now seemed to be uniformly smooth. But the newest images show a leathery texture, filled with dunes and other evidence of sublimination of the ices as they rise to the surface, turn to solids, then get transformed directly into gasses.

A Wider Angle

NASA / JHU

Mountains made of water ice (the "bedrock" of Pluto) and ancient frozen shorelines reveal more about the boundary between Sputnik Planum and the darker regions of the Cthulhu Regio. The presence of cratering in the left hand of the photo contrasts with its absense on the right, showing ancient and recent terrain changes, respectively.

Bright Colors

NASA / JHU

Color imaging and spectroscopy help bring this enhanced view of Pluto's colors, showing regional variation across the hemisphere we've seen thus far.

Global View

NASA / JHU

The above map laid over a more global view.

Methane

NASA / JHU

A small view of the methane on Pluto's surface, with purple indicating where it's present. The blacked out upper portion is where data hasn't come in yet, where the darker hemispheres on the bottom portion (informally called Cthulhu Regio after the works of H.P. Lovecraft) indicate no methane ices are present at the surface. This could give some clues as to the internal makeup of the world.

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